Chapter 25 5.f Pay attention to what successful people say

Everyone desires to succeed.For some reason, all the people who are considered successful are also willing to share their success stories.When those well-dressed people stand on the stage and talk freely, even ordinary looks can make people feel glamorous.Every sentence, every word, and even every word they said seems to be full of countless deep meanings, and every word is loud and clear.The people in the audience, although their minds were full of thoughts, still struggled to concentrate on purpose, wishing to write down every word and go back to ruminate. However, the audience should have their own wisdom and understand the basic principles of communication, so as not to fall into the situation of "believe what people say".When listening to anyone's speech, you should not have a "defensive, questioning" mentality, which may miss important information, because our mentality will become our colored glasses, so that we can only receive filtered information .However, it can be just as dangerous, or harmful, to accept in the end all the information given, without analysis and thought, in its entirety.

First of all, successful people don't have to, have no obligation, and often don't have enough time to tell all the details.Believe me, if you only use wealth, power, and status to measure success (success in the worldly sense), then behind all success there are countless hardships, and at the same time, it is often full of a lot of completely ulterior details.For example, the boss of a large domestic company will certainly not tell everyone about certain decisions he made under the pressure of peer competition and tremendous pressure from various aspects.As is the pursuit of great wealth, so is the pursuit of great power and supremacy.

Everyone should have the right to remain silent on certain matters.Those who are sharing the so-called "successful experience" should also enjoy such rights.As the American police often say, "You have the right to remain silent, but what you say becomes evidence in court." None of us have the right to demand full details from another person in non-extremely extreme circumstances .But if they say it, you take it all; if they don't say it, you take it as nothing.Then you are on the same IQ level as the guy in the fable who cheated. Secondly, almost all successful people, when telling their success stories, will intentionally or unintentionally exaggerate the price of their success, exaggerate the difficulties they have faced and overcome, and exaggerate the difficulty of their final success.This is not their intention, because they are human beings, and like all ordinary people, they have varying degrees of vanity needs to be satisfied.Their current success is certain, so the glory of this success depends on how difficult it is, that is, the worse the starting conditions, the more difficult the current success will appear.Only when the difficulty is higher, the more applause can be obtained, the stronger the degree of recognition will be, and the more people will admire it.

They do this, and there is another subconscious source, in order to protect themselves.For everyone who has achieved great success, the most urgent task is to protect their own vested interests.There is no difference in this game of chess. Not only must you continue to "attack", but more importantly, you must "defend" steadily.They exaggerate the price of their success so much that they subconsciously say "Look, success doesn't just come, it needs to pay a lot of price, you'd better think about it" - this is another kind of The "intimidation" in form is essentially no different from the warning "If you want to practice magic skills, you must first leave the palace".

They do it, and they have support from the audience or listeners.Most people like to hear successful people tell about their hard experiences - the harder the better, the more bitter and bitter the more they like to hear and see.The lives of most people are mediocre, even including most of those who are successful—if I guess correctly.The reason why the movie is wonderful is caused by two reasons, the first is the artistic processing, and the second is the compression of the time period-telling the story of a life in one and a half hours, it is no wonder that there are no ups and downs, thrilling and exciting.However, real life cannot be turbulent and ups and downs every day. In fact, no one's heart can bear such a life.

On the one hand, most people will never wake up to the truth that "plainness is the truth" in their whole lives. On the other hand, many people subconsciously hope that all successful people will achieve success through hard work, because they subconsciously I feel that only in this way can I explain my "unsuccess" and accept my "unsuccess" more naturally.If their subconscious thoughts are expressed, it may be like this: "Look, how difficult is it to succeed? It takes so much to pay! I haven't paid so much. Is it normal to be unsuccessful..." In fact, For those who are eager to succeed but have not yet succeeded, what a consolation the successful people's "experience of bitterness and hatred, blood and tears" is!

In addition, and more importantly, even if those successful people did not intend to conceal or exaggerate intentionally, they may still have various deviations when telling their real experiences.Successful people, or those considered successful, are still humans and not gods.Since they are still human, they are likely to have the common defect that most people have: "cognitive biases" (cognitive biases, a concept often mentioned in psychology).For example, "the human brain has a self-protection function: forgetting pain" mentioned earlier. Therefore, when successful people tell others about their success stories, they often intentionally or unintentionally cover up the mistakes that they have never regretted.Because those experiences were so painful that their brains automatically erased those memories -- if their brains were functioning properly.So, a more reasonable explanation is that they didn't do it on purpose, they just didn't know how everyone's inherent "cognitive bias" affected them.Of course they will talk about the difficulties they have encountered, but have you noticed such an interesting phenomenon?In their narration, in the end, will they finally get rid of those seemingly irreversible predicaments with incomparably tenacious spirit? -- Such narration was of course warm applause.So are there any predicaments that they have not been able to solve until now?I don't believe they don't, unless he lives in another world - heaven.

What's more, we must understand the fact that sometimes, the experience of "successful people" is useless at all, because those experiences are fundamentally wrong, but the key is that they themselves may not know it.For example, they have encountered an era of rapid economic growth, making money no matter what they do, and making a lot of money; therefore, from a macro perspective, it is not the valuable experience they think is at work, but the macroeconomics. They are such an opportunity.However, who is willing to admit that their success has nothing to do with their own experience?One of the common cognitive biases that humans have is to attribute success to ourselves and blame others or bad luck for failure. (There is a special term in psychology: self-serving bias.) And when those "successful people" do this, they often don't intend to deceive you-they even have good intentions.

Finally, you must know that some "valuable experience" is correct, but it may not be so effective when you put it on yourself.What is most likely to lead you astray is what you know about yourself.The elders always tell us that "people value self-knowledge", what they forgot to say, and they may not even know what they should really say is this: "People value self-knowledge-how difficult!" Imagine the last time you When you can't help but feel your heart beat after hearing a success story, you will know how valuable self-knowledge is.Of course, there's no need to feel inferior about being so easily emotional, all people do -- just to varying degrees.

For example, successful people often say that they don't care about money, they know the value of personality.But, you are different from them, you don't have enough money now!Believe me, the vast majority of people, when they have no money, have a very difficult understanding of "precious personality".You have to eat, your family should not be starved, and when the basic conditions cannot be guaranteed, "personality has a use" has become the choice of many people.Cui Jian described it this way: "For love, songs are nothing; for life, love is nothing." The truth is often not pleasant to listen to.In fact, this is not a cynical or cynical statement, but a calm description of life by someone who has the courage to accept the reality.

There is a very practical suggestion: you might as well do the opposite - try to learn from the losers.Don't talk about imitating successful people, even if it is difficult to observe successful people.There are many successful people, but there are very few real successful people around you; the things behind the success are difficult to see clearly, and the authenticity of the so-called success is also difficult to judge, and the successful people will beautify and package their experience intentionally or unintentionally. And all of this is interfering with your judgment.But it is relatively easier to observe losers, because their failures are often obvious and certain, and the reasons for failure are often easy to determine, although losers will find various excuses.Moreover, the number of losers around you is obviously more than the number of winners, so you have more opportunities to observe. So, with that realization, you often encounter what is called luck -- when you're about to make a mistake, someone else makes the same mistake before you.Of course, "focusing on learning lessons rather than taking time to gloat" is not an easy thing to do in itself. The last thing I want to add is that the purpose of my article is definitely not to subvert your views from now on, so that you will treat all "experiences shared by successful people" as dung.I just want to remind you, "It's silly to believe what people say." Only after careful screening, the real valuable experience of the real successful people is priceless.It's just that, on the one hand, we need to spend more time on screening, and on the other hand, we need to spend more time to really understand ourselves, so that we can avoid the disasters that may be caused by "generalizing and applying mechanically".